XBMC on Raspberry Pi

Fellow HTPC enthusiats should keep an eye on the Raspberry Pi, a tiny Linux based computer that will be launched for around 25USD. At that price, the implications it could have on home theater setups are boundless, really just limited by your imagination. Further news has hit today that XBMC runs pretty well on the small platform. This is especially important, since XBMC is arguably the most popular HTPC software. Both XBMC and Raspberry Pi have large development communities, and I’m sure more HTPC-centric news will flow once these little guys are released to the public.

Just think about it, you could use these to set up small touch screens around the house, each with a Raspberry Pi unit mounted behind it. Put XBMC on each of them (get the XBMC developers to make a more touch-friendly interface) and you would have room-by-room access to your media.

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8 Comments

Matt

Posted January 23, 2012 at 5:22 AM

Nice find- this could be awesome!

John

Posted January 23, 2012 at 6:03 PM

Wow, this product looks great. Goodbye Apple TV.

Posted January 23, 2012 at 6:31 PM

Take it easy for now, this hasn’t actually been released yet though it’s supposed to drop at some point in the first half of 2012. When it does we’re going to try and get our hands on one right away and get some serious HTPC usage out of it. Keep an eye on this site for what will hopefully be one of the first reviews and guides of the HTPC functions of the Raspberry Pi. Just judging by the specs I would imagine it’s going to have some trouble with HD content.

Paul

Posted January 25, 2012 at 4:48 PM

This is going to be crazy nice but you really need this on the network so you can use the XBMC app to control it… then you can have these on every TV in the house.
I wonder if you can plug in a WiFi dongle and give it wireless access. or even a BT adapter

Posted January 25, 2012 at 5:29 PM

I’d imagine you can use a USB-based WiFi or BT adapter. It really depends what kind of drivers are going to be available at launch. I’m sure the driver library will grow once the community gets its hands on these.

I want a little network of these bad boys, I hope to use them to control a bunch of screens. I suppose the ability to go wireless would be pretty important for that.

How quick is BT at sensing location? Would be sweet if the closest screen to you (well, your smartphone) lit up with some sort of personalized information. Or started a personalized playlist. Or something. I suppose you could use RFID for that, but a RFID daughterboard/sensor would have to be developed.

Paul

Posted January 25, 2012 at 6:40 PM

The thing that sucks about BT is a lot of the current remote apps don’t support it.. and i am betting if you want to to roll over the the next location it will have issues due to pairing.

With wifi it would be really easy to drop these guys around your house. The best option might be to get something like the Logitech K400 Keyboard to work, it seems like the closes thing to what the Revue uses (K700).

The annoying thing is the Raspberry Pi is so dam cheap you start spending more on the keyboard and cables then you do on the computer 😛

Posted January 25, 2012 at 6:44 PM

Right, forgot about the pairing mechanism. Not particularly effective for roaming.

The K400 would be great, will that change over to whichever node it’s closest to?

And yeah. Spending more on peripherals than the unit itself seems so backwards. But I have a feeling I’m going to be buying all sorts of add-on boards and stuff just to see what this is capable of. The base board has all sorts of exposed pins for different I/O.

Paul

Posted January 25, 2012 at 7:15 PM

The k400 uses “Logitech Unifying technology” so its like BT with some proprietary pairing.
If i am not wrong you can link it up to all the receivers and then it should control them all… but only the ones in range will receive the signal.

I hope add-on board will give it better capabilities in the robotics world. My highschool used something like this, but it had like a 2mhz cpu and 32kb mem and i think with add-on boards was something like 300$